TheLefty said:
(on a completely unrelated note, I feel cool posting this from my iPhone.
OOoooOOooOOOoO,
faaancy! Why don't you just go eat caviar sprinkled with diamonds out of a baby seal's skull and leave the rest of us bourgeoisie boot-lickers to rot in peace?
F**king plutocratic...
[small]...why don't I have an iPhone....? :...([/small]
Ahem -- er, back on topic, I'd say you need to define the criteria by which people are to judge the systems. Actually, I think that is where most of the disagreement would be. Some would say that the games you can play on it define the system, but you seem to want to judge them based on implicit features and capabilities.
I'd say that in terms of hardware capabilities, it's obvious that the later generation would be much "better." You could argue with more room, however, that features such as playing music, connecting to the internet, photo/video capabilities, etc. are vestigial or that they over complicate what was once a simple "plug-and-play" experience.
Personally? I'm a Sony man, so I'll do PS2/3. Half of the games I play on my PS3 are from the last generation. The switch to an internal HDD has it's drawbacks, but I generally consider it an improvement, especially due to the increased size. The move to wireless and the convenience of a remote start/stop is almost a winner by itself, but the need to charge controllers can be a pain, not to mention how much more fragile the things can seem when they're not tied to your system. The new one seems to lock up a lot more than the old one did though, and it's harder to fix. I'll give it to the PS3, but by a smaller margin than you might think.
I'll also argue that, because the improved hardware specs of successive generations of consoles have driven up the cost of development, the video games industry suffers, at least on the consumer side. Less variety and volume overall, in spite of constantly increasing personal investment (sure, I can get
shiny new game, but unless I get a hi-res, gigantic TV, I can't even read the eye-straining little text blurbs. Online content? Sure! Just drop another $50 a year. And if you want to play with friends, that extra controller will be
another $50. And have you seen the Kinect's price tag?). In that way, you could make a case that the previous generation, if not the console itself (for what relevant qualities does it really have outside of hardware if it's not just by it's era?), was better. Honestly, the question is
could the old be better than the new, and in that case, yes (obviously). A buggy, complicated system that no one can make games for is obviously worse off. But nobody would make such a thing, so a more pertinent question would be, has it happened yet or will it happen?
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